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Media Coverage

Thanks to Mark Thiele, Chief Strategy Officer at Apcera for sharing his thoughts on the state of orchestration and deployment of containers for DZone’s upcoming Containers Research Guide that will be published in early-August.

Q: How is your company involved in the orchestration and deployment of containers?

A: Container management platform for cloud-native and legacy apps.

Q: What do you see as the most important elements of orchestrating and deploying containers?

A: It goes well beyond orchestrating and deploying. We believe a support framework of capabilities is needed which includes: networking, storage, orchestration/scheduling, lifecycle management, audit patch management, security, deployment, automation, bursting, monitoring, log aggregation, routing, load balancing, and firewalls. We allow the customer to define the requirements of their containers and add capacity. We provide a container ecosystem.

IT organizations in large numbers have been deploying containers on top of VMware because that’s the dominant platform deployed inside most enterprise IT organizations. But many of those organizations also want to be able to deploy those containers on a public cloud service as needed. To provide that capability, VMware has been relying on Apcera, a provider of a container management platform that makes it easier to move containers between various platforms.

The two companies this week announced that Apcera has attained VMware Ready status within the VMware technology partner ecosystem. Eric Leach, vice president of product management for Apcera, says the relationship between the two companies is strategic because IT organizations don’t want to be locked into a single platform. While containers such as Docker can be ported easily, Apcera provides a means to attach policies along with all the networking configuration information needed to deploy those containers on top of, for example, VMware NSX network overlays or within a software-defined network (SDN) service provided by Amazon Web Services. That’s critical, he says: Given the ephemeral nature of many containers, there needs to be a platform that abstracts away the complexity associated with deploying containers on multiple platforms that don’t share any common base of infrastructure.

“There are a lot of enterprises out there… and they want to do app modernization, but they’re kinda stuck with their legacy applications,” explained Apcera director of product management Henry Stapp, speaking with Alex Williams at DockerCon 2017 in Austin, Texas. “They want to be able to migrate those to cloud, and then also have a way to support those modern, containerized applications."

“With Apcera, you can basically shrink-wrap your legacy applications,” Stapp continued, “modernize the environment around them, so that legacy application doesn’t even realize it’s been containerized.”

It’s important to consider the differences in deploying private vs. hybrid clouds, as the impact on everything from strategy to costs depends on the cloud model, says Jan Plutzer COO, Apcera. “Implementing a private cloud is very different from implementing a hybrid cloud. Most companies recognize that technology is critical to their competitiveness,” she says. “But is running a datacenter really core to your business if you are a lifestyle brand, or a restaurant franchise, or an insurance company? For most, the answer is no.”

But Plutzer reminds us that a hybrid cloud deployment can be a transitional step — and a step that can carry some unanticipated costs.“If they've got a legacy investment in datacenters, infrastructure, networking, etc., they often end up with a gradual move from on-premise to public or private cloud. This leads to an extended period of multi-cloud deployments, or a so-called hybrid cloud.The biggest mistake most make on this hybrid cloud journey is not accounting for the time and cost required to adapt operational processes to this hybrid environment -- particularly in the cost required to retrain resources to manage these new environments.”

I’ve been chasing the idea of a true utility compute model since 1999. I see containers as the evolution that followed virtualization that followed blades and they are getting us ever closer to a full and efficient abstraction from underlying infrastructure.

Since that time I’ve been involved in industry activities like the Cloud Native Compute Foundation and I’ve articulated the opportunity associated with container technology in numerous blogs and speaking engagements around the world at leading industry events. For the past 10 months I’ve been working for Apcera, the first Enterprise capable container management platform.

Press Releases

Apcera, the leader in enterprise container management, today introduced a new workshop series, Live Workshop - Modernizing Apps and Infrastructure Made Easy. The first live, online workshop, taking place on April 11, will demonstrate deploying new and existing workloads.

Apcera the leader in enterprise container management, today announced its inclusion in Gartner’s Market Guide for Cloud Workload Protection Platforms. According to the report, “by 2018, three of the top five cloud workload protection platform vendors will have added explicit support for container visibility and policy enforcement on a per-container-basis.” Apcera provides this functionality today, delivering enterprise-grade security and governance for cloud-native as well as legacy workloads

Apcera, the leader in enterprise container management, today announced that its Chief Strategy Officer, Mark Thiele, will present at Container World 2017, taking place February 21-23 in Santa Clara, Calif. Thiele will participate in a panel discussion on the topic “Becoming Cloud Native: Taking it One Container at a Time.” This panel will feature additional representatives of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation from companies including Red Hat, Mesosphere and CoreOS.

Apcera, the leader in enterprise container management, today announced its presence at GigaOm AI, taking place February 15-16 in San Francisco. Mark Thiele, Apcera’s chief strategy officer, will be moderating an industry panel titled, “Customer Experiences in AI,” to be held on Thursday, February 16. The panel will also feature executives from Comcast, Cybric and Talla.

Apcera, the leader in enterprise container management, today announced that it was named a winner among the EMA Innovators of Amazon re:Invent 2016. This award, along with recent market analyst reports from IDC, 451 Research, ESG and Current Analysis, underscores Apcera’s critical role in the emerging container management landscape. While Apcera fully addresses enterprises’ need to deploy Docker in production securely, it also offers enterprises the only container management platform built for modernizing legacy applications.

Apcera is the market leading enterprise-grade container management platform — driven by security and policy — that gives IT leaders the confidence and control to drive innovation and move faster, securely. Built for cloud-native as well as legacy applications, Apcera lets IT teams containerize, deploy, orchestrate and govern a vast range of workloads across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. Fully integrated and completely turnkey, only Apcera offers industry-leading agility and time-to-value without sacrificing security or control.

Apcera enables key enterprise use cases including deploying Docker and other cloud-native workloads in production securely and at scale, legacy application modernization and hybrid cloud mobility. Global 2000 companies use Apcera to lower CapEx and OpEx, improve time to market and reduce risk.